? Rotaional Grazing, High Tensle, and Goats.

[hillbilly beef man]

I have a few questions for anyone who would care to help me out. First a little back ground. I bought 30 acres next to my house I am starting to fix up after years of neglect. The good: it has three different streams on it, so water is not a problem, I can bush hog the whole place with a 4wd, which is rare for around here, and all but two acres is in grass. The bad: the entire fence needs to be replaced, one four acre section scares the crap out of me when I bush hog it and takes forever, and there is two acres of white pine that needs to be cleared off.
Here is my plan. I have never used rotational grazing and I am thinking about trying it out here. I am considering sectioning the place off into three or four sections for rotational grazing. I am going to use high tensile electric. What I am trying to achieve with rotational grazing is a higher stocking rate and doing away with the need to clip my pastures, or at least keep me off of the steepest parts as much as possible. I would also like to build my fence so that I can incorporate goats into my rotation system if needed.
What my questions are
Question: #1 how much does rotation grazing allow you to increase your stocking rate? Here the average rate is a cow and a calf for an acre and a half. Would an acre to a pair be too much for my system? Ten acres of the place is flat enough to mow for hay, so I have also have the option of mowing the first cutting of hay off of it and then pasture it the rest of the year.
Question #2: Can you keep a place clean with just cattle and no clipping, or only clipping every few years with rotational grazing? Mainly I am trying to keep myself from clipping one section in particular.
Question #3: Would you build three paddocks or four? I can have up to four and still have a water source for each paddock.
Question # 4: Will a six strand high tensile with a hot charger keep in goats? I do not want them right now, but I would like to have the option of using them to follow the cattle to clean up the pasture if I need them. I might fence in the two acres of young white pines and see what they could do with it though. Thanks for any advice you can provide.

Here is a picture of the top of "pucker hill" looking down.

Here is a view looking from the side

This is the hill I want to stay off of with a tractor if at all possible. To give you some idea of the grade the trees are straight, and you can tell by the trees it has been several years since it has been clipped last.

 

[luke03cr]

With rotational grazing you want to be able to keep them in a paddock for several days to a day or 2. To give you an idea on stocking rate, I run 25 mature cows on 2 AC paddocks and rotate every other day. A good rule of thumb for grass growth is 250lbs per inch per acre of dry matter. That's for fescue, seeing that your in east tn like myself and that's almost all there is for grass around here. I graze the grass to no less then 3 in then move them to the next paddock. If you don't have enough cattle to keep up with all the grass then u can set a few AC aside for hay. Smaller paddocks are usully more efficient then larger paddocks. They won't waste as much food that way. You won't need to string 5 or 6 rows of wire for this. The best way that I've seen is pick up sum electrified rope that you see horse folks use. 2 strands of that on sum temporary tpost and you'll be able to move them all over the field easily. Once the see that its electrified they won't touch it, so 2 strand usully is plenty.

 

[hillbilly beef man]

Thanks for the reply Luke. It seems like you have learned to embrace fescue instead of fighting it too. I am probally going to have to go with a less intinsive rotation than you. Once a week is about all I am going to have time in the summer to move them to a new paddock (I only see the house in the daylight on Sundays from May to Sept), so I am going to have to go with a larger paddocks. I know that they are going to waste more grass than yours do, but I am hoping they will still keep the place clean.

 

[Chris H]

Lessons learned over the years with MIG, high tensile, cattle, goats...

1. If at all possible, fence the perimeter with the most fence you can afford. We use 5 wire for the most part. A friend went with woven wire because a calf under a week old will walk through high tensile leaving the field and will NOT walk through it to get back in.

2. Fence the interior with polywire on step-in plastic posts. You can divide & subdivide as needed as your herd grows/shrinks, forage grows, etc. You can get by with 1 strand, if your calves run under to a new paddock, well you're just practicing creep-grazing.

3. Electric fence & goats... You need one wire high enough they won't jump over, one wire low enough they won't crawl under, and one wire in the middle so they don't walk through. We've had them, won't have them again until husband is no longer here.

4. Stocking rate for cows... it will vary by year. We've had 2 years of wet springs followed by no rain in the summer. This year we've had good rain all summer and we could have had twice the number of cows we had last year. We made hay from pastures and some pastures have gotten overripe. It happens.

5. It's not a good idea to let the cattle have free access to the creeks. They will foul the water, stomp areas into mud, kill fish, etc. There are alternatives to using the water.

 

[Fire Sweep Ranch]

I don't know anything about grazing goats (and don't care to!), but we practice MIG and have been for about 5 years now. Our parameter is made of 5 strand barb wire with one single strand of the wire that is electrified, about waist height. Then we sub divide the pastures into grazing plots depending on how much forage and how many cows. In the picture below, we are running 19 cows and 8 calves, and rotate about every 2 and a half days. Each plot is about 1.5 acres, but that is just a guess. The entire field is 13 acres, and we just move the single strand of polywire from plot to plot. In an ideal world, we would have 8 or more rolls, with several hundred of the step in poles and preset everything. But all that cost a lot of money! So we set up two plots at a time, using three roles of wire and about 15 step in posts per line. Each year we buy a few more posts and wire/rolls. We only have 45 acres, but graze more than 20 mature cows on it year round, along with getting hay for the winter (we hope, last year we had to supplement the hay with purchased hay since we had no rain!). The pasture pictured below we cut in May for hay, and this is the regrowth. I had to brush hog it a few weeks ago, set high, because the grasshoppers ate all the leaves off the clover and left just the stems with dried up flowers, and I did not want to deal with pink eye (had one case last week, because the first section we grazed on did not get cut before the cows were moved). Anyway, very doable, and it spreads your feed a lot farther! If you look to the right of the cows, that is where we just rotated off of, and you can see where the old polywire fence line was, because to the right of that is regrowth from the plot they were on just three days ago!

 

[Fire Sweep Ranch]

Hahaha, talk about grasshoppers, look at the picture closely.... Notice the t-post up close? It is COVERED in grasshopper.... Grr...

 

[igrowgrass]

1. Your stocking rate is going to vary depending on the amount of grass you have on the ground, but once you get everything going and it sounds like you can irrigate if things get dry, you should be able to stock at least 100,000 pounds per acre if you're going to move them every day.

Having time to move them is just a matter of making time. If you have 30 acres of good grass, and you decide that you want to graze each piece 3 times a year, then you have to divide it into 120 paddocks. Obviously not with permanent fencing, but with step in posts and electric.

This means 30 acres, divided into 120 paddocks, you get 1/4 acre per paddock. At 100,000 pounds per acre, you could put 25,000 pounds on a quarter acre if you move them every day. If you're talking stocker steers that would be 25 steers if you're finishing them on grass. You can start with up to 50 calves if you get them around 500 pounds, and then sell some off as they grow to keep your stocking rate right.


2. YES, you can keep everything clean with just cattle. You shouldn't have to mow anything if you're moving cattle through at the right density. What they don't eat will be trampled to the ground and made into ground litter. This is the entire principle of mob or high density grazing.

If you find that you are still getting undesirable stuff in your pasture you can stock some sheep or goats with your cattle. They will eat a lot of stuff that the cattle won't and will help keep the place clean.


3. You asked if you should do three paddocks or four? Umm...I would just fence the perimeter with permanent high tensile electric and then do the inside with poly and step in posts. The way that I run cattle you need a lot more than three or four paddocks.


4. Six strand electrified high tensile will hold just about anything that walks. Just make sure that you have your wire low enough to keep baby whatever your fencing inside the fence. Also, make sure that you have a wire high enough to keep anyone from thinking about jumping out.

I couldn't imagine any critter wanting to take a stab at getting through six wire electric. With high tensile I just make it a point to pay attention to a few things.

a. keep your wire tight.

b. keep your grounds in good shape.

c. keep vegetation from getting all up in the electric wires. You can weed whack it if you have to, but it really does make a difference.